metalised

As an update to [0] and [1], the scammers have now completely deleted my page of 50k subscribers.

I am devastated. 10+ years of building a heavy metal community, gone like a puff of smoke, just like that. And Facebook still hasn't replied to a single message. I hate to imagine what would have happened if I was an actual business...

I am reaching out to the HN community one last time. If anyone has any advice or can help me talk to an actual human being at Facebook and restore my page and ownership, please get in touch!

(or if not, at least vote / comment your own frustrations or horror stories below, to help get my story be seen by such a person, if you think this post deserves it...)

  [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706571
  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423

About a month ago, a malicious actor filed and succeeded in making an ownership claim on my Facebook page. I had given some background to this previously on HN, a few weeks back [0].

As a follow-up to [0], after several unsuccessful attempts to restore my rights and ownership to the page, the scammer recently reasserted their claim to my page: see screenshot [1]. Meanwhile, it's been over a month, and facebook has not responded to my numerous messages, and I doubt any human will ever see those messages anyway.

I don't know how the scammers did it, but I assume either my personal credentials were hacked (I have since updated all relevant passwords), or, more likely, it was something along the lines of [2]: i.e. they created a dummy entity and then claimed that my page was a duplicate of their business. Which means that, even though it would be instantly obvious to any human moderator checking the page's history and contents (e.g.from [3]), that the scammer's ownership claim is unfounded, since my page is not, and was never backed by a commercial business entity, whatever useless 'proof' they offered as a business will likely still pass Facebook's automated processes for ownership claims.

It seems the scammers have now moved to phase two of their scam. An account misleadingly named 'Facebook Verifications' recently sent me this message on facebook, along with a list of other facebook pages that were presumably also scammed (in which I recognise other famous names in the heavy metal scene, e.g. Richard Henshall from Haken) [4][5][6].

Also, a random etsy shop's facebook page supposedly selling earings has linked to their 'metalised' earrings, nonsensically linking to my page (presumably because of its large readership), though this may be an unrelated stunt [7].

I'm reaching out to the HN community. If anyone has any ideas how I could fight the scammers and get my page back, please help a metalhead out!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706571

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/yuWvu.jpg

[2] https://www.techprevue.com/how-to-claim-a-facebook-page/

[3] https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ux4s.png

[4] https://i.stack.imgur.com/spwK2.jpg

[5] https://i.stack.imgur.com/LPw59.jpg

[6] https://i.stack.imgur.com/X8xpg.jpg

[7] https://www.facebook.com/mumzele.lilly/photos/pcb.3075592826045948/3076311139307450

I have been the owner of a facebook page [0], which I created more than 10 years ago, and has built into a nice community (focused around heavy metal) in that time. It is the sister page of the website https://metalised.wordpress.com/. The biggest feature of this site and facebook page are the end-of-year metal reviews, which have been very popular, and have been often re-shared on facebook by the featured bands with a lot of gratitude.

Recently, someone hacked the page somehow, and managed to make themselves the owner of the page. They also created a business account, and gave it full admin access.

For some reason they either couldn't or simply didn't kick me out completely before updating my passwords, and I still have some editing/posting privileges, but I cannot kick out the new owner or admin, and I have no idea what they're going to do with this power. As far as I know, they can delete the page, or start spamming/scamming my community any moment now.

I have been going through facebook's official pages and reporting processes for about a month now, but there has been zero response, and facebook makes it impossible to talk to a human. Furthermore, the "I've been hacked" page [1] only deals with personal accounts, not pages; there is no option on recovering ownership of stolen pages. In fact, their only suggested solution, here [2], seems to be "Ask the new owner to give you back access". Are they serious???

Has anyone here had any similar experiences and a solution to this problem? I saw someone here the other day suggest "buying an Oculus" in order to get help with a personal account, but I don't see that working for page ownership, since my account is technically fine. I find it very difficult to believe that a community of 57k metalheads can disappear in an instant like this (or worse, be used for scams) and there's not a single person at Facebook I can email about it!

[0] https://www.facebook.com/metalised.net/ [1] facebook.com/hacked [2] https://www.facebook.com/help/738660629556925